Best New Horror 29

by Stephen Jones

  From the same imprint, The Dark Sea Within: Tales & Poems was a substantial collection of the work of Jason V. Brock that included a number of new poems and a story collaboration with Sunni K. Brock and William F. Nolan.

  The Doom That Came to Dunwich from Endeavour Press collected nine Lovecraftian stories by Richard A. Lupoff with an Introduction by Philip Harbottle.

  Revenge of the Vampir King was the first volume in Nancy Kilpatrick’s “Thrones of Blood” series of vampire novels published by Macabre Ink/Crossroad Press.

  Hersham Horror Books’ “Primal Range” series of short paperback novellas continued with Bury Them Deep by Marie O’Regan, Perfect Darkness Perfect Silence by Richard Farren Barber and Monstrous by Charlotte Bond.

  Paul Dale Anderson’s The Girl Who Lived: Megan’s Story was a serial-killer novel from 2AM Publications.

  From Spectral Press, Dan Weatherer’s novella Crippen was based on an unproduced stage play and purported to offer fresh insights into the notorious British serial killer. The author’s own biographical notes ran for ten pages at the back of the book!

  Jordon Greene edited Down with the Fallen: A Post-Apocalyptic Horror Anthology for North Carolina PoD imprint Franklin/Kerr Press. The trade paperback contained sixteen stories by Jessica Clem, Toby Alexander and Marvin Brown, amongst others.

  Co-edited with an Introduction for Dark Mind Press by James Everington and Dan Howarth, Imposter Syndrome was an anthology of ten original doppelgänger stories from Gary McMahon, Neil Williamson, Stephen Bacon, Phil Sloman and others. Shame about the typo in the title.

  What if Henry James, Bram Stoker and Arthur Conan Doyle had founded an exclusive dining club in London where the cost of a seat at the table was a story? This was the inventive premise behind The Ghost Club: Newly Found Tales of Victorian Terror from Crystal Lake Publishing. With fourteen original stories, Scottish writer William Meikle cleverly mimicked the styles of those three authors, along with Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, H.G. Wells, Oscar Wilde, Jules Verne and others.

  J.S. Breukelaar’s supernatural thriller Aletheia, also from Crystal Lake, was about an island on a remote lake that nobody remembered.

  Brendan Deneen and David G. Barnett edited Chopping Block Party, a PoD anthology of fourteen original stories from Necro Publications, set on the small-town street of Golden Elm Lane. Contributors included Paul Kane, John Everson, Richard Chizmar, Damien Angelica Walters, Gerard Houarner, Jeffrey Thomas, Tim Waggoner and co-editor Deneen, while Friday the 13th scriptwriter Victor Miller supplied a brief Introduction.

  From the same imprint, In the Country of Dreaming Caravans was a novel about a girl lost in the desert by Gerard Houarner and GAK, while Charlee Jacob’s Containment: The Death of Earth was an apocalyptic horror novel involving an abused boy and angels.

  Published by JournalStone, Behold the Void was a debut collection of nine stories (six original) by Hollywood screenwriter Philip Fracassi with an Introduction by Laird Barron, while Sacculina from the same author was a fast-paced novella about the crew of a fishing boat fighting off mutated ocean creatures.

  Aaron J. French’s debut novel The Time Eater was about the ritual summon-ing of a vast supernatural entity, and Michael Griffin’s Hieroglyphs of Blood & Bone was another first novel from the same imprint.

  Curtis M. Lawson’s Black Pantheons: Collected Tales of Gnostic Dread from Wyrd Horror contained ten short stories and a novella (eight original) along with a brief Forward [sic] by the author and a preview of what appeared to be a novel.

  Tales of Blood and Squalor from Dark Cloud Press was an anthology of fourteen “sordid, wretched, seamy, seedy” stories edited by Lee Allen Howard.

  Despite its title, Gehenna & Hinnom Books’ Year’s Best Body Horror 2017 Anthology edited by C.P. Dunphey featured forty-two mostly new stories (seven reprints) by James Dorr, Kurt Newton, Gary Power and others, along with an Introduction by film-maker Shane Ramirez.

  From the same PoD imprint and also edited by Dunphey, the first three perfect-bound issues of Hinnom Magazine featured interviews with S.T. Joshi, T.E. Grau and Philip Fracassi, along with fiction by Kurt Newton, G.A. Miller, John Leahy, Joanna Costello and others. The second volume was a double-sized “H.P. Lovecraft Birthday Edition”.

  The first issue of editor-in-chief Tara Blaine’s perfect-bound Decidious Tales: Tales of Darkness and Horror from Black Thunder Press featured seven stories and six poems, including reprints from Lovecraft, Charles Baudelaire and Clark Ashton Smith.

  Issue #27 of Perpetual Motion Machine Publishing’s Patreon-funded Dark Moon Digest featured ten original stories, and two articles, plus cover art by Allen Koszowski.

  One Night at the Villa Diodati from Shadowridge Press was an attractive paperback to which Peter Atkins, Kelly Dunn and editor Stephen Woodworth contributed short stories in the style of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelly, John William Polidori and Lord Byron. The contents had originally appeared on an online blog in slightly different form.

  Everything That’s Underneath was a collection of eighteen stories (three original) by Kristi DeMeester from Apex Publications.

  Eric Ian Steele’s collection Nightscape was published as a PoD hardcover by Parallel Universe Publications. It contained eleven stories (three previously unpublished), while Parlour Tricks by Carl Barker contained fourteen stories loosely themed around conjuring tricks, four of them original to the collection. Shades collected twenty-two “dark tales of supernatural horror” (eleven reprints) by Joseph Rubas.

  Also from Parallel Universe with an Introduction by David A. Sutton, Radix Omnium Malum collected sixteen dark stories (two original) by Mike Chinn, and for fans of pulp-hero fiction, Chinn’s Walkers in Shadow from Pro Se Press contained seven rollicking novellas in which quasi-immortal hero Damian Paladin and adventuress Leigh Oswin pitted their wits and flying skills against demons, zombies and old-world vampires across the length and breadth of 1930s America.

  Weinberg Tales from American Fantasy Press/Tattered Pages Press was a tribute to the late writer and pulp collector Robert Weinberg edited by Doug Ellis, Robert T. Garcia and Phyllis Weinberg. It included numerous articles by its subject, and also tributes from such friends and colleagues as Joe R. Lansdale, F. Paul Wilson, Otto Penzler, Will Murray, Stefan R. Dziemianowicz, Stephen Jones, Phyllis and Alex Eisenstein, Randy Broecker, Mort Castle and many others.

  From Australia’s Oz Horror Con, The Refuge Collection Volume 1-3: Heaven to Some…and The Refuge Collection Volumes 4-6:…Hell to Others! were two hefty PoD hardcover volumes that reprinted a number of stories first published as e-books online. Authors working in the shared-world universe included Lee Murray, Paul Kane, Ramsey Campbell and series editor Steve Dillon, and the fiction was illustrated by Will Jacques, Edward Miller, Brian Craddock and others. Unfortunately, despite all profits going to charity, the lack of page numbers and running heads didn’t make either book easy to read.

  The Empath’s Tale: The Complete Story was the latest volume in Dillon’s Hellraiser-inspired Refuge Collection series. Reprinting parts 1-6 of the online series aimed at “helping people who’ve lived real-world horror stories”, all profits from the sale of this collection also went to charity.

  Between the Tracks: Tales from the Ghost Train was a PoD hardcover anthology of twenty-three railroad-themed tales (seven reprints) and a comic-strip from Things in the Well publications, edited and introduced by Dillon. Authors inclided Ramsey Campbell, M.R. James. Christopher Golden, Paul Kane, Lee Murray, Charles Dickens and the editor, while an annotated reprinting of Clive Barker’s ‘The Midnight Meat Train’ merited its own Introduction, accompanying interview and critical essay.

  As the title indicated, Below the Stairs: Tales from the Cellar was a trade paperback anthology from editor Steve Dillon that contained twenty-one stories (five reprints) set in the basement by, amongst others, David H. Keller, Theresa Derwin, Ramsey Campbell, Paul Kane, Clive Barker, H.P. Lovecraft and, once again, the editor hi
mself.

  With an Introduction by Bram Stoker Award-winner Alessandro Manzetti, When the Night Owl Screams from MoonDream Press/Copper Dog Publishing collected more than 100 poems (five reprints) by Michael H. Hanson, with illustrations by Chris Mars.

  With mainstream publishers continuing to cut back on their midlist titles especially when it came to collections and anthologies the independent presses were busier than ever in 2017, and none so much as Peter and Nicky Crowther’s PS Publishing, which also published most of its trade titles in 100-copy signed editions.

  In Bruce Golden’s pulp-ish Monster Town, a private investigator searched for a killer and a missing teenager amongst the classic movie monsters in 1960s Hollywood.

  Meanwhile, Forever Konrad: A Vampire’s Vampire by Martin Goodman featured the titular bloodsucker in a race against time to find a teenager with special powers, and there were more vampires to be found in Ian R. MacLeod’s historical novel Red Snow.

  The lyrics to a pop song reopened dark secrets in R.B. Russell’s debut novel, the 1980s-set murder-mystery She Sleeps.

  When a girl discovered that her superhuman strength came from the Viking god Odin, she travelled to the City where she faced seven challenges in Kim Wilkins’ dark fantasy, Odin’s Girl. Marni Scofidio’s Knucklebones was set in a run-down North Wales seaside town and involved the escalating feud between two women.

  Rough Trade collected twenty-three criminally overlooked crime and mystery stories from the late 1950s and early ’60s by Robert Silverberg, who also supplied a fascinating historical Introduction.

  Darker Companions, edited by Scott David Aniolowski and Joseph S. Pulver, Sr., was confusingly subtitled Celebrating 50 Years of Ramsey Campbell, despite the fact that Campbell’s first short story was published in 1962 and his first novel appeared two years later.

  It contained twenty stories by, amongst others, Steve Rasnic Tem, John Llewellyn Probert, Alison Littlewood, Marc Laidlaw, Gary McMahon, Gary Fry, Kristi DeMeester, Cody Goodfellow, Jeffrey Thomas, Lynda E. Rucker, Thana Niveau and Adam L.G. Nevill. However, the editors apparently elected not to include any story introductions or author biographies, which might have allowed the contributors to put their work into context within the confines of a tribute anthology. Also, given its subject’s insistence on precise spelling and punctuation, it was disappointing that this volume was so carelessly put together.

  The sixth volume of editor S.T. Joshi’s Black Wings series, subtitled New Tales of Lovecraftian Horror, featured twenty-one stories and poetry (one reprint) by such authors as Ann K. Schwader, Darrell Schweitzer, William F. Nolan, Caitlín R. Kiernan, Nancy Kilpatrick, Don Webb, W.H. Pugmire, Steve Rasnic Tem, Jason V. Brock and Stephen Woodworth.

  There were more Lovecraftian horrors to be found in Tales from the Miskatonic University Library edited and introduced by Darrell Schweitzer and John Ashmead. The anthology contained thirteen original stories by Don Webb, Adrian Cole, Harry Turtledove, Will Murray, P.D. Cacek, James Van Pelt, Robert M. Price and others, including co-editor Schweitzer.

  Dark Places, Evil Faces was yet another charity anthology, with any proceeds going to MacMillan cancer support. Editor Mark Lumby assembled twenty-five stories (six original) by such genre luminaries as Brian Lumley, Richard Chizmar, Jack Ketchum, Graham Masterton, Peter Crowther, Ramsey Campbell, Adam L.G. Nevill and himself, while Shaun Hutson supplied the Introduction.

  A husband was forced to investigate when his wife failed to return home from the titular gathering in Australian author Alan Baxter’s novella The Book Club, while a man became the person he always wanted to be, but with unexpected consequences, in Stephen Volk’s novella The Little Gift.

  With The Complete Adventures of Solar Pons edited by Stephen Jones, PS reprinted revised and corrected versions of all Basil Copper’s macabre mysteries featuring the eponymous Sherlockian detective created by August Derleth. Published as 100 sets comprising two hefty signed and numbered hardcovers in a slipcase (£175.00), it also contained a completely new book, The Solar Pons Companion. After it sold out prior to publication, The Complete Adventures of Solar Pons was reissued as seven inexpensive paperbacks under the Drugstore Indian Press banner.

  Also published as a DIP paperback was a welcome reissue of T.E.D. Klein’s epic 1984 Lovecraftian novel The Ceremonies, which the author slightly revised for its new appearance.

  Under The Pulps Library imprint from PS, artist Pete Von Sholly’s excellent “Lovecraft Illustrated” series of hardcover collections continued with The Festival and Other Abnormalities, Herbert West Reanimator and Kindred Night Spawn, Dagon and Diverse Monstrosities and The Other Gods and Various Ethereal Effusions. Each volume contained a knowledgeable Introduction by S.T. Joshi and numerous colour illustrations by Von Sholly.

  Clive Barker’s Next Testament from Earthling Publications was actually the debut novel of comics writer Mark Alan Miller, about a revived entity that claimed to be the multi-coloured Father of the Old Testament.

  Christopher Golden and James A. Moore’s Bloodstained Wonderland from the same publisher was set during the London Blitz, as vampire creatures from Oz attempted to track down two women who possessed a strange green pendant. The book was illustrated by Glenn Chadbourne.

  Chadbourne also supplied the illustrations and Moore the Foreword to Josh Malerman’s Goblin, a novel in six novellas set in the titular town. The thirteenth volume in Earthling’s annual “Halloween Series”, it was limited to 500 signed and numbered copies and fifteen traycased lettered copies ($400.00).

  From Fedogan & Bremer, Earth, Air, Fire & Water: Four Tales of Elemental Mythos Horror! featured a new Cthulhu Mythos novella and three reprints by Brian Lumley, illustrated by Jim Pitts.

  As if Robert Shearman’s clever Introduction alone didn’t make it worth picking up, Holidays from Hell: Fourteen Stories also featured a selection of relatively recent stories and one original by the inimitable Reggie Oliver, who also supplied the Afterword and the illustrations. It was available from Tartarus Press in a hardcover edition limited to 500 copies.

  From the same publisher, Seven Strange Stories was another superior collection from Rebecca Lloyd that contained two reprints. It was published in an edition of 300 signed copies.

  The Autobiography of Arthur Machen reprinted the memoirs Far Off Things and Things Near and Far with a new Introduction by Stewart Lee and four colour plates of the original manuscript. Tartarus also issued a new paperback edition of the 1904 magical text The House of the Hidden Light by Arthur Machen and A.E. Waite, who were both members of the Order of the Golden Dawn. Waite scholar R.A. Gilbert provided an explanatory Introduction and fully annotated text.

  Holy Terrors was a paperback of five classic stories by Arthur Machen, published in association with the release of Obsolete Films’ portmanteau film of the same name, released on DVD.

  A man was possessed by the untrustworthy cross-dressing ghost of his twin brother in Magda McQueen’s ghost novel Mirror Dead which, like Andrew Hurley’s second novel Devil Day, was available from the publisher in a 300-copy signed edition.

  A Country Still All Mystery was a collection of esoteric essays by Mark Valentine, limited to 300 signed copies from Tartarus.

  From Subterranean Press, Clive Barker’s fix-up novella Infernal Parade contained six short pieces originally used as backstories for a series of “Tortured Souls” action figures designed by the author and Todd MacFarlane in 2004. Bob Eggleton supplied the cover art and six interior illustrations. It was available in a signed edition, limited to 500 copies plus a fifty-two copy traycased, leatherbound and lettered edition for $275.00.

  Bubba and the Cosmic Blood-Suckers by Joe R. Lansdale was a prequel to Bubba Ho-tep, as Elvis and his band of warriors battled vampire-like aliens in New Orleans. It was published in a signed edition of 1,500 copies and a lettered and leatherbound traycased edition of twenty-six copies ($250.00).

  Dear Sweet Filthy World collected twenty-nine stories by Caitlín R. Kiernan, most of which wer
e published on the author’s online subscription service. A 600-copy leatherbound signed edition came with a bonus chapbook from Subterranean.

  From the same publisher, the novella Final Girls by Mira Grant (Seanan McGuire) concerned a new psychiatric treatment that involved patients watching scenes from horror movies. It was available in a signed edition, limited to 1,250 copies.

  Peter Straub’s novella The Process (is a Process All Its Own) featured 1950s Midwest serial killer Tillman Hayward and was available from Subterranean in a signed edition limited to 750 copies.

  The Weight of Words edited by Dave McKean and William Schafer featured twelve stories written around McKean’s sepia paintings by, amongst others, Neil Gaiman, Joe Hill, Joe R. Lansdale, M. John Harrison, Ian Sinclair, Caitlín R. Kiernan and the artist himself. It was published in various states, including a traycased, lettered edition of twenty-six copies ($500.00).

  Edited solely by publisher William Schafer, The Best of Subterranean reprinted thirty stories from Subterranean Magazine by Joe R. Lansdale, Joe Hill, Kelly Link, Robert Silverberg, Ian R. MacLeod and others, along with an unproduced Twilight Zone script by George R.R. Martin.

  Robert McCammon’s 1987 novel Swan Song was reissued by Subterranean in a 500-copy signed and slipcased edition illustrated by David Ho. There was also a $400 traycased edition limited to fifty-two lettered copies.

  The Slave Tree, from Cemetery Dance Publications, was a novel by the late Alan (Peter) Ryan (who died in 2011), set in the Amazon rainforest.

  Brian Hodge’s novella I’ll Bring You the Birds from Out of the Sky was available in a 1,000-copy signed edition illustrated with colour plates by Kim Parkhurst, while Bentley Little’s novel The Handyman was also published in a 500-copy signed deluxe edition.